Very Computer

Hello everyone,
our customer has decided that Excel 2000 will be used to
access Analysis Services, since other frontends like
Arcplan are far too expensive. We have been working with
Office XP-Pivot Tables and noticed large differences
between XP and 2000. Is there a documentation describing
the differences in detail. Our customer might want to
upgrade to XP if the advantages are strikingly
convincing.  

With Office 2000 I noticed:
- producing cube-files was not possible
  -->no offline OLAP
- grouping elements was inactive
- no field list with tree view available
- show/hide Detail inactive
- order elements inactive
- Element properties not available
- Sorting and Top Ten much harder to find for user

Is there more? We have installed PTSFull to get Excel
2000 working at all.

The rule for sorting was unclear to users. If one sorts  
by revenue (top ten, descending) and Excel is showing the
years 1999 and 2000, will it sort by 1999, 2000 or by the
sum of revenue of both years.

I know this is really an Excel Forum question, but the
amount of BI related answers is close to zero there.

TIA Lutz

This April 2002 MSDN article may help you:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnexcl2
k2/html/odc_xlsql.asp
What's New in Microsoft Excel 2002 PivotTable Reports
..

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Thanks, that helped a lot.

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A word of caution, if you have any dimensions of a
significant size, Excel will be painfully slow.  We have a
customer dimension with 50,000 members and it takes 4-5
minutes to drill into any data when this dimension is in
play.  We didn't discover this until after our design was
done and we had loaded the data.  Microsoft has worked
with us and determined/validated this as an issue.  Our
other dimensions have only 100-200 children at any level
at the most, many are much smaller and they are fine.  

The performance issue is due to the use of the NON EMPTY
keyword from Excel, it is very slow...MS has told us that
this issue won't be addressed until Office 12, approx. 3
years away....

Quote:>-----Original Message-----
>Hello everyone,
>our customer has decided that Excel 2000 will be used to
>access Analysis Services, since other frontends like
>Arcplan are far too expensive. We have been working with
>Office XP-Pivot Tables and noticed large differences
>between XP and 2000. Is there a documentation describing
>the differences in detail. Our customer might want to
>upgrade to XP if the advantages are strikingly
>convincing.  

>With Office 2000 I noticed:
>- producing cube-files was not possible
>  -->no offline OLAP
>- grouping elements was inactive
>- no field list with tree view available
>- show/hide Detail inactive
>- order elements inactive
>- Element properties not available
>- Sorting and Top Ten much harder to find for user

>Is there more? We have installed PTSFull to get Excel
>2000 working at all.

>The rule for sorting was unclear to users. If one sorts  
>by revenue (top ten, descending) and Excel is showing the
>years 1999 and 2000, will it sort by 1999, 2000 or by the
>sum of revenue of both years.

>I know this is really an Excel Forum question, but the
>amount of BI related answers is close to zero there.

>TIA Lutz

>.